Also present at the unveiling of Dolomites II were several of the artists who had exhibited at Papa’s gallery, Works on Paper. Jim Carlyle. Arthur Bellows. Pavel Zly. And a young blonde woman named Muriel Green.

Muriel was not an artist. Papa and Mr Parish employed Muriel three and a half days a week to supervise Works on Paper, answer the phone, relay enquiries. She studied Fine Arts at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and had previously worked at the National Gallery of Victoria. She was able to talk very convincingly about art and artists and colour and limited editions and German Expressionism. She had absolutely no artistic ambitions of her own, which made her the perfect candidate for the job. She had what was then described (after Marilyn) as a ‘bobbed nose’ and (after Ann Margret) a ‘sex-kitten hairdo’ and was just plump enough for men to want to take good fleshy handfuls of her while pretending to respect her intelligence.

Muriel was very good at selling art. It wasn’t just her sex appeal or even her art education: she had a natural instinct for the vulnerabilities and vanities of the art collector. She could detect a buyer from among the milling and merely interested. Once detected, she could read him. (And it was always him.) The businessman who needs reassurance about appreciation in value. The undecided aesthete who wants to buy but can’t choose, and needs to be talked logically through the possibilities. The stamp collector who needs one of everything, but most of all needs a patient ear to work out what is missing. The impoverished would-be collector who needs to be convinced he can get by without food and gas for a month. Mr Parish actually referred to her as ‘Kitten’—not to her face, behind her back—and said he kept his fingers crossed she wouldn’t fall in love any day soon …

I understood what he meant because I was in love with Kitten straight away. If I were a grown man, I would have given her flowers and perfume and talked her into marrying me. That was what men did. But Mr Parish was also wrong, because I didn’t think women were the ones who fell in love. I couldn’t imagine Mother ever falling in love with Papa, or Mrs Parish falling in love with Mr Parish. Falling in love was something men did: they fell head over heels and then a woman couldn’t get away until she finally said yes. That was how marriages got done.